The long anticipated Internet Explorer 9 has been made available as a public beta. The latest version of Microsoft’s famous web browser has a range of new features, but the most instantly noticeable is the entirely new interface. Following the lead of the likes of Firefox and Google Chrome, Internet Explorer 9 Beta features a much more steamlined look than previous versions.

The new look eliminates many of the familiar on-screen elements to allow users to better focus on the web sites they visit rather than the browser itself. Tabs, navigation controls and the address bar are now combined into a single toolbar leaving much more room to display pages – the address bar now also functions as the search bar. The One Box, as the address bar is now known, functions well. Type an address in to visit a site directly, or type in a search term and choose which search engine should be used to perform the search from the pop-up menu that appears.

Windows 7 users can take advantage of features such as the ability to pin individual web sites to the taskbar as well as support for jumplists. Supported sites can enable users to access different feature of the site through jumplists – in the case of Twitter, the jumplist provides access to different sections of the site such as direct messages and the usual timeline.

Anyone who has used a browser other than Internet Explorer will be used to the idea of a download manager. Internet Explorer 9 Beta now boasts such a feature, making it easy to access the files you have downloaded and keep track of the progress of current downloads.

On the performance front, Internet Explorer 9 does not disappoint. There is now support for HTML 5, CSS3 and a new Javascript engine that means sites load faster and respond better than ever before. To help speed things up further, the Add-on Performance Advisor indicates how long individual add-ons take to load and provides users with the opportunity to disable any which slow things down too much.

Microsoft’s latest offering includes many enhancements that have been designed to improve the overall web browsing experience and should do a lot to silence some of Internet Explorer’s detractors.

32- and 64-bit versions of Internet Explorer 9 Beta for Vista and Windows 7 can be downloaded from http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/internet-explorer/download/ie-9/worldwide.